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A rooster picked out in inlaid glass mosaic across the lid lifts this hinged brass box out of the purely decorative and into Teran's figural register. The bird is composed of cut mosaic tiles set into the wrought brass, the colored tesserae doing the drawing while the metal supplies the box's structure and hinge.
The form sits at the center of Salvador Teran's independent output. After years as an anonymous designer at Los Castillo, where he was prized as a designer and technician, he set up his own taller and, by Davis and Pack's account, was combining metal with mosaic to produce boxes, trays, and other decorative objects (Morrill, p. 206). A figural lid like this rooster is a natural extension of his interest in mosaic as a pictorial medium, an interest that also produced his architectural mosaic murals.
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